Just post everything to ease access

I gained a whole new perspective on New York’s Freedom of Information Law while sitting in on a Friday conference at Albany Law School focusing on public information access in this digital age.

Like most journalists, I suspect, I’ve viewed the advent of electronic records as providing a nearly limitless supply of new windows into what our governments do and how our tax dollars are spent.

I still do.

But an entirely unanticipated level of sympathy and concern began to well up as I listened to Ruth Earl, records access officer for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, talking about the challenges she and her staff face in responding to between 13,000 and 15,000 FOIL requests each year.

Along with the traditional sorts of inquiries — requests for copies of industrial discharge permits, say, or some ancient report on the upstate otter population — her in-basket overflows with requests seeking “any and all” records containing data and communications in electronic formats.

Responding to some of those requests can take weeks or even months while staffers wade through hundreds or thousands of e-mails, attachments, spreadsheets and other electronic records, weeding out duplicates, irrelevancies, information that should be redacted to protect privacy, and the occasional e-mail exchange that morphs into a back-and-forth conversation about meeting schedules or lunch plans.

“What do you do when you turn up 1,300 records? What we do at DEC is we just suck it up,” she said.

But even then, it can be hard to be sure that important records aren’t being missed, Earl said. It’s a rare employee who has time to spend sorting and organizing every e-mail, she noted, and the chances of consistency in those systems are slim.

Before hearing Earl and her colleagues talk about the challenges of managing and providing electronic records, I already was warming to a concept called “proactive disclosure.” Now, I’m convinced it’s the way to go, not only for the sake of the public’s right to know, but also for the sake of public servants.

Tim Hoefer, who has filed an estimated 1,500 FOIL requests with his colleagues at the Empire Center for the organization’s Web site, SeeThroughNY, explained the idea during the conference.

If New York state agencies and authorities, local governments and school districts were to adopt proactive disclosure as a consistent policy, there’s’ no telling how much more information would be available to New York citizens without ever needing to file a FOIL request.

Under proactive disclosure principles, agencies would routinely post up-to-date, data-rich records on their Web sites, where they would be constantly available for members of the public to consult and analyze.

Payrolls, spending records, contracts, transcripts, audits, reports and meeting minutes are just some of the candidates Hoefer listed for proactive disclosure.

It would, he contends, cost agencies virtually nothing, and preserve precious employee time for other work.

“This is data that already belongs to us,” said Hoefer. “It’s the people’s data.”

Hoefer compares the interest of citizens and taxpayers have in government information to the interest of boards of directors have in the data and dealings of a corporation.

“It should not be a surprise that people want to see this information,” he noted, so why wait for a FOIL request to put it out there?

Check out the Empire Center’s http://www.seethroughny.org/ web site to get a sense of the possibilities if proactive disclosure were the norm. With just a quick spin through, I found many items of interest.

I found the employment contract for the current superintendent in my little hometown school district. I found a list of four 2008-09 legislative member items distributed in the town of Niskayuna, and I perused an intriguing list of contracts for a state agency.

Why shouldn’t all that information be available directly from the school districts, Legislature and government agencies?

There is at least one bill in the state Legislature that would take steps toward proactive disclosure. It would authorize the state Committee on Open Government to study the feasibility of requiring agencies to proactively disclose documents, make recommendations and estimate the costs or savings from enacting proactive disclosure.

At a time when any baseball fan can get his fill of player stats on the team Web site and any corporate investor can check today’s stock price with a quick spin on the Internet, it should be no surprise that we expect similar access to information about how our government is spending our tax dollars.

But aside from convenience and efficiency, there’s one overriding reason to start putting more government data on line as soon as possible. “The number one argument for proactive disclosure,” said Hoefer, “is it seems like the right thing to do.”

The Advocate can be reached at 454-5700 or advocate@timesunion.com. The Advocate appears in print Thursdays and Sundays.